Saturday, 26 April 2014

“It’s really very simple,” explained CBI director-general Sir
John Cringeland. “We only meant to put
our left leg in to the referendum debate, shake it about a bit and take it out
again. Unfortunately, an over-enthusiastic
tea boy, in the grip of a sugar rush from too many Viennese Whirls, faxed an
application form to the Electoral Commission asking if we could put our whole
selves in.

“Well, it’s only bloody Scotland, we thought, so we decided
to let it go. We’d no reason to believe
that “Donald Duck” wasn’t an authorised signatory, and anyway a junior clerk
had shredded the only copy of our signatory list to make bedding for his hamster. It looked as if registration would help us to
comply with campaign spending rules, since we’d lined up Alistair Darling to
speak at our annual fund-raising dinner, and he generally charges £20,000 just
to fart the National Anthem.

“Of course, consulting our members has been a grey area ever
since our last IT upgrade, during which our former preferred supplier
accidentally translated our records into Japanese. But I sounded out some decent chaps at my
club, and they were all in favour of registration, not to mention giving that
upstart Salmond a damn good thrashing.
So we thought our Scottish members, whoever they might turn out to be,
would meekly fall into line.

“Imagine our surprise when some of them resigned because
they wanted to stay neutral! I mean, how
can you stay neutral when, each time someone is persuaded to vote Yes, a kitten
dies? And who’d have thought that
Scotland had so many universities? Anyway,
we consulted Professor John Curtice via his coin-operated interface, and he repeatedly
advised us that, despite mounting evidence, nothing had really changed. That was fine until last night, when I
inadvertently turned into a dark alleyway and found myself confronted with the Prime
Minister and the Director General of the BBC, both carrying baseball bats.

“As a result of that discussion, the CBI would like to
retract its registration with the Electoral Commission. We will do so by invoking the “Old Boy Network
Get Out Of Jail Free” scheme, which allows us to carry on as if nothing has happened and vilify anyone who objects as a frothing Cybernat. We remain committed to total bias in the
referendum debate, but now intend to pursue this in an underhand fashion, in line
with the values of the most successful union the galaxy has ever known.

“Mistakes have been made, but the good news is that I am not
responsible for any of them. For the
benefit of the House of Lords wardrobe department, my size is ‘medium’ and I
look forward to making your acquaintance shortly.”

A cat-burglar with a rucksack full of Tipp-Ex was later found in a crumpled heap outside the offices of the Electoral Commission. "Bloody anti-climb paint," he was heard to moan while being wheeled away.

In response to Sir John’s statement, the Institute of Stable
Door Manufacturers issued guidance stating that its products are best used
when the horse is inside the stable, and less effective when it has already completed
a season in pantomime and entered itself in the Cheltenham Festival.

Meanwhile, the BBC announced an exciting new venture with
the CBI, which will result in all of its Scottish referendum coverage being
broadcast on a jointly-owned channel aimed specifically at the gullible. This will be called CBeebies.

Wednesday, 9 April 2014

The Scottish referendum debate took another lurch into Bizarro
World this week, as Labour's campaign co-ordinator Anas Sarwar revealed the first of his “Dad’s Army” group of
clapped-out zombie politicians from the Blair era to try to stick a fork in the
toaster of the Yes campaign.

This turned out to be Lord George Robertson, a small brain in
a big head whose utter mediocrity somehow hasn’t prevented him scuttling up the
ladder of success, where in a just world he would have landed painfully on the
part of his anatomy he reserves for talking.
You wouldn’t normally trust George to run a bath, far less an
organisation possessing 45% of the world’s nuclear weapons, but it so happened
that in 1999 Tony Blair, itching to get started on making poverty history by
bombing the poor, urgently needed a glove puppet as Secretary-General
of NATO.

Already the recipient of several “Useless Lickspittle of the
Month” awards during his tenure as Defence Secretary, wee George was the obvious candidate. His five
carnage-strewn years in the role made him the man he is today: patrolling the outer reaches of sanity, ever
vigilant for threats to Western security, US hegemony or job offers
from companies specialising in ways of blowing people up.

So it was that the other night George found himself being trundled
on stage, with a short fuse fizzing fiercely, in Washington DC. By complete coincidence, a gilt-edged
invitation from prestigious think tank the Brookings Institution had come
fluttering through the letter box of his fallout shelter asking him to speak at
the very time Alex Salmond would be at “Tartan Week” in New York. Alex, ever the showman, was working hard for
Scottish interests, or, as Johann Lamont would put it, “wasting
taxpayers’ money staying in hotels when, if it was me, I’d be sleeping in
ditches and living off the kindness of strangers.”

In the interests of balance, it was only fair that someone
should be given the opportunity to trash Scotland’s reputation. Rising to the challenge, George, who’s rubbed shoulders with the elite,
albeit mostly against their midriffs, decided he’d do so in true Presidential
style. Unfortunately, the tools he chose
were Nixon’s paranoia, Reagan’s reality deficit and Dubya’s
all-round dumbness. The resulting speech
was the equivalent of screaming at the top of his voice for forty-five minutes
before being led away in a straitjacket.

Better Together’s translation service remarked, “Lord
Robertson’s masterful address, carrying echoes of Dr Martin Luther King, merely
pointed out how Scotland’s pig-headed insistence on breaking away from the UK
will result in the destruction of all life on earth. With NATO torn apart because no-one wants to
take Trident, a Russian-Chinese alliance will conquer the world and, as a
result, Starfleet will never be formed.
The Klingon Empire will consequently meet no opposition when they come
to vaporise the planet in the year 2156.
These are facts that the Yes campaign has never denied, and Scottish
voters need to take account of them.”

In their heart of hearts, Better Together probably wished
that the forces of darkness would kidnap George and haul him off to a dungeon
in Mordor, never to be seen again. Even
the Unionist press was struggling to report the speech without using the words
“complete diddy”. The Herald called it “powerful”, possibly referring to its stench rather
than its vigour. And the pain continued,
as George manifested himself again on Newsnight
Scotland, assuring startled hedgehog Gordon Brewer that his speech made
perfect sense because he’d looked up “cataclysmic” in the dictionary.

But, even as they eat their socks with embarrassment, Unionists need not be entirely downhearted. Comedy gold it may have been, but the debacle did achieve
three interesting goals:

Completely upstaging Alex Salmond.Finally broadcasters had a good excuse to ignore any statesmanlike remarks he
made about constitutions, enlightened self-interest and other dangerous rabble-rousing
topics.Previously this week Scotland Tonight’s justification for not
presenting the Yes case had been reduced to “Ooh look, a rat’s just chewed through
this cable.”

Advancing an argument so mind-bendingly stupid
that it’s impossible to counter it without sounding dismissive and
insulting.Nicola Sturgeon has to be
commended for not yelling, “Aw, come on, do you expect me to take this pish
seriously?” but wee George was still able to accuse her of playing the man, not
the ball.This will have gone down a
storm in the Better Together tactics truck.

Making Alistair Darling, who flew out to Washington
at taxpayer expense on Tuesday to deliver the usual cliché-encrusted claptrap
to selected audiences, seem like the voice of reason.Anyone who watched his hag-ridden performance
on last Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show would
have considered that beyond the scope of human endeavour.Of course, it may not be of long-term benefit
to his public speaking career, where his remuneration depends on how much his
audience is prepared to pay for him to shut up.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Barack Obama commented, “Yeah,
the Scotch can pretty much do what they like in their vote. Remind me, are they the ones with castles,
monsters and leprechauns?”

Friday, 4 April 2014

Should No campaigners venture out into the streets without
body armour? That’s the question
currently being posed by self-styled influential commentators after a study by
IBM (Incredibly Biased Media) revealed that Cybernat rudeness is reaching
epidemic proportions.

“It was bad enough when Cybernats were confined to their bedrooms,”
said one political figure, wearing a paper bag over his head for
anonymity. “Having the word PISH tweeted
at you isn’t very agreeable when your Scottish cringe is normally greeted with
nods of approval in the House of Lords. But
at least they used to be out of sight, unless one of them accidentally managed
to Skype you, so you didn’t have to gaze with horror upon their sweaty
countenances and grubby semmits.

“Now we’ve let them get hold of iPhones, so they’re able to go
outdoors, meet up in huge gangs and go on…. on…. sticker rampages.” The last
two words came out in a scarcely audible whisper, and he needed a nice cup of
camomile tea before he could continue.

“Did you read about what they did to Ian Murray’s
constituency office?” he sobbed. “Ian takes great pride in its appearance, taking
pains to ensure it projects just the right amount of soul-sucking negativity. And those… those vandals…. came along and allegedly stuck at least one and possibly
more Yes stickers on the window, in full view of his core vote!

“We all know how dangerous Yes stickers are. With the light blocked out and the office in
darkness, a staff member banged his knee against the corner of a desk, and
unleashed a volley of swearing that sent two colleagues home in tears. So the job of removing the stickers fell to
the not-very-bright intern, who accidentally swallowed the sponge he was using and
had to be rushed to hospital. Meanwhile,
several people walked under his ladder and will have bad luck for the next
seven years.”

I asked Police Scotland about this vile hooliganism, but
unfortunately they didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about. However, journalists who had been amongst the
first emergency services on the scene were happy to provide corroboration,
although their emotions were understandably too raw for them to agree on all,
or indeed any, of the facts.

Meanwhile, inevitably in a country as dreich as ours, indoor
Cybernattery continues unabated. I was contacted
by “Bill”, founder and patriarch of the holiday company Bawheid Travel, who
explained how devastating an impact it can have on businesses innocently trying
to railroad staff.

“All I did was e-mail my employees saying that after independence
the firm would be buggered, because European law would immediately impose a
500-year ban on us offering anything more than weekend breaks in Millport. I told the staff it was basically up to them, but
if they voted Yes I would have them fed to giant mutant cockroaches while I
sprayed them with tomato sauce.

“Well, you should have seen the abuse I got! And that was before the e-mail even went
public. After that, we started trending
on Twitter, and not in a good way, as Cybernats piled in saying that they’d
rather hack out their spleen with a potato-peeler than do business with
us. Not that it really mattered by then,
because most of the staff had gone off in the huff and I’d had to sack the rest
for insubordination.”

Was it possible, I enquired, that people weren’t doing
business with Bill’s company not because of his pro-Union views, but because it
was run by a complete idiot? His
rejoinder, an unoriginal but forceful combination of sex and travel, suggested a
possible future for him in the 18-30 holiday market.

I had to know more. Fortunately,
in an entirely unlikely scenario I’ve just made up, one of The Scotsman’s senior journalists agreed to speak to me, with the
proviso that he could keep his face hidden behind a large yucca plant. His diagnosis was stark.

“This ‘independence’ notion may seem a clever idea to Alex
Salmond as he sits in a champagne bath in his luxurious American hotel suite,
but it’s incredibly divisive. Look at
the places in the world that have recently experienced civil war, and you’ll
see they’re all independent countries.
What does that tell you?

“This toxic debate will ruin friendships, tear apart
families and have people smashing mirrors in an attempt to throttle their own
reflections. It’s like the worst
excesses of Nazism, Communism and the French Revolution rolled into one. Someone may even get hurt before long, which would
be a blessing in disguise because then we’d have a reason to call the whole
silly thing off.”

Blimey! Was this the
official view of Better Together, I wondered?
I dialled their 666 hotline number and, after 45 minutes on hold
listening to Land Of Hope and Glory
over and over again, I became so irritable that I was easily able to convince
them that I was Alistair Darling. A
senior manager, “Blair”, agreed to meet me at a local coffee shop on condition
that I bought him several doughnuts.

“Cybernats have got no respect,” he whined. “You wouldn’t
believe their potty mouths when they’re online!
Half a dozen of the GCHQ listening staff had to be referred to trauma counsellors,
and most of the rest don’t understand the meaning of the words used. Although it is fair to say that Alistair
Carmichael resembles some of the body parts quoted, if observed in a slightly
dim light.

“They’re everywhere now, handing out saltires in the street,
fixing us with quizzical stares and meeting in groups of more than one. You can’t trust any of them: the old women have unexpectedly pointy elbows
and can do you a real mischief with a shopping trolley, the pensioners can fire
their false teeth with deadly accuracy at any target within twenty-five paces,
and even the uninterested-looking youngsters can unleash sarcasm on you at the
slightest provocation. Some of the younger
ones are even able to deliver inspiring speeches! What's the point of infiltrating the teachers’
unions if that’s going to happen?

“It’s just the problem you get when you’re dealing with a
mass movement of people. We don’t have
any human beings in Better Together, so we’ve gone with politicians instead. We’re convinced it will come right eventually,
since no-one will believe the depths of depravity to which our mouthpieces are
actually prepared to stoop.”

I’d heard enough. “I
don’t agree with you, since I still have some moral fibre,” I said, “but thank
you for your honesty.”

I shook his hand, and he immediately grasped his head and
went down like a footballer in the penalty box. “Help, police!” he yelled. “Cybernat attack!”

As I was led away by an uncomfortably swift gathering of officers,
two thoughts forced themselves to the front of my brain.

Firstly, would there be a PC in the prison
library to enable me to continue blogging?

Secondly, would they let me wear my one and only, slightly grubby semmit,
as long as I promised not to use Skype?

I was halfway through writing today's blog post when I heard about the death of Margo MacDonald. It was sad to hear of the passing of one of the greatest influences in Scottish politics in the last 40 years and more. Whatever the shape of the new Scotland after September, Margo will have played a major part in bringing it about. It's a great shame that she will not live to see the results of her life's work.Like those of many people today, my thoughts are with Jim Sillars, Margo's husband, and with her family.

Tuesday, 1 April 2014

Pundits last night described themselves as “flabbergasted”
by the latest unexpected turn in the Scottish referendum debate, as the No campaign
sensationally re-branded itself as Better
Together for Independence.

“It was the focus groups,” declared Alistair Darling to a slack-jawed
press conference. “When we showed them
our campaign literature, those who weren’t too traumatised to speak insisted it
was far too negative. We’d been hearing
the same from Charles Kennedy and David Steel, but we’d ignored them, because
that’s just what you do with Liberal Democrats.

“So we sat down with the stakeholders and asked ourselves,
well, what sort of idea is it that’s really resonating in a positive way with
voters? And, when we looked at the
momentum in the polls, we could see that it was obviously independence.”

The thrust of the campaign will change immediately, as
multi-million pound efforts are thrown into getting the White Paper out to a wider
audience. “The Scottish Government has
really dropped the ball on this,” said Darling. “They simply haven’t put enough
money into distribution, and with only five months left we’re going to have to
ramp things up fast.”

BTI, as the organisation will henceforth be known, has
commandeered a fleet of ice-cream vans, and is currently fitting them with
miniature cannons which will fire the document at households. “We’re hoping the jolly music will cause
people to open their windows,” remarked Darling, “but, just in case, we’re
advising Edinburgh investment firms to buy shares in glazing companies.” As a sideline, a loyalty scheme will entitle
purchasers of 10 ice cream wafers to an autographed copy of the McCrone Report.

The organisation will now start accepting invitations to referendum
debates, where it intends to criticise pro-independence campaigners for not
being ambitious enough. It has also
introduced its own range of “Yes” badges, bigger and shinier than everyone else’s,
and will ask employers to circulate e-mails threatening their staff with the
sack if they don’t wear at least five. “It’s
a clear business opportunity,” maintained Darling, who himself has a sports
version with a built-in camera for taking selfies on people’s doorsteps. The burgeoning collectors’ market is already
identifying favourites, such as the Star Trek (“Affirmative”), the
Vicky Pollard (“Yehbutnobutyehbut”) and the Ann Summers (“Yes Yes Oh YESSSS!”).

BTI now acknowledges that Westminster is “too big, too rich
and too clever by half” to be in partnership with Scotland, but the organisation’s
position on post-independence negotiations is rock-solid. “If George Osborne doesn’t agree to currency
union,” asserted Darling, “I’m going down to London to give him a piece of my
mind. I used to live in his house, so I
know all the hiding places.”

On the question of Europe, with Mr Barroso now the subject of
an arrest warrant on the grounds of his being a “complete tosser”, things are
looking fairly rosy. Just in case, however,
BTI has arranged for Spanish fishermen to hold a candlelit vigil outside the
European Parliament until Scotland’s position is resolved. “If that doesn’t work,” said Darling, “Alastair
Carmichael has had a quiet word, and, if called upon, Mr Putin is prepared to
annexe Orkney and Shetland. That should
make fast-track EU membership for the rest of Scotland a formality.”

Spin-off organisations are already beginning to
proliferate. Bastards for Scotland, a
cartel of several big banks, has announced that its members will shortly be moving
their head offices to Scotland and paying huge bonuses to randomly selected
psychopaths. Meanwhile, National
Corrective, a grass-roots movement of people who mistakenly believe they can
write, paint and sing, is planning a series of concerts at which the erroneous
views of members of the audience will be mercilessly ridiculed in rhyming
couplets.

Wings Over Scotland, the enfant
terrible of the independence movement, will be purchased by the BBC in a
multi-million pound deal and, in Darling’s words, “we’ll get some proper
journalists in to write it”. Its
founder, Rev Stuart Campbell, will be promoted to Lifetime President, but will have
a less hands-on role as more and more of his time is mysteriously taken up by
issues such as rodent control. “We have
no shortage of rats in our organisation,” commented Darling.

The centrepiece of the revamped Wings will be its
serialisation of Alan Cochrane’s six-part biography of Alex Salmond, titled I Admit It, He’s A Genius. “It’s been hell for Alan all these years,” said
Darling, “writing poisonous drivel about Alex every week in the Daily Telegraph, when all he really
wanted to do was give him a big hug.” A
huge promotional campaign is planned for Glasgow Underground, where any advertisements
not supporting independence have now been banned.

At Holyrood, it’s been confirmed that Johann Lamont’s opening
question on Thursday will be, “What is the First Minister’s favourite colour?” Ruth Davidson and Willie Rennie are reported
to have asked Presiding Officer Tricia Marwick if it’s all right not to ask a
question, but instead to scatter rose petals in Mr Salmond’s path and lead
the chamber in a chorus of For He’s A
Jolly Good Fellow. Darling,
meanwhile, described rumours that SNP members will continue to pose questions
about hospitals and the dualling of the A9 as “not helpful”.

Professor John Curtice, who attended last night’s press
conference by virtue of his general omnipresence, was asked about the impact of
the evening’s announcements on the public’s voting intentions. He examined his tea-leaves carefully for a
few moments, then pronounced, “Good heavens, quite astonishing! The No campaign
has suddenly shot ahead by fifty points!”

About Me

I'm a writer who returned to Scotland in 2013 after 30+ years in the Home Counties. If you enjoy reading my ramblings, please return often and recommend me to your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Planet Earth. That way someone may one day give me money to do this sort of thing, which would be nice.
william_duguid@hotmail.com